Completion of Landauer House and move-in marks the passage from architectural project to lived home, establishing the modernist ideal Viktor and Liesel regard as perfection. Its materials, furnishings, and open Glass Room make the house a carefully composed environment for living; its later transformation into a biometric centre and a children’s gymnasium gives that domestic vision a history its original owners could not control.

Construction and Completion

The house and the baby grew together, but at different speeds. While Ottilie’s development was marked by successive milestones, construction proceeded through the laying of steel beams, the pouring of concrete, and the enclosing of space. Delays, material shortages, and workforce problems stretched through summer and autumn, turning the building’s growth into a source of argument and frustration before the difficulties were resolved. When the shell was finally finished in winter, there was no ceremony. Viktor, Liesel, and their companions approached a structure that looked less like a home than a warehouse for machinery or building supplies. Inside, bare concrete, white plaster, dust, and single hundred-watt bulbs made the unfinished building feel far removed from the ideal it would become.

The finishing work continued through autumn, changing that shell room by room. Deliveries came up Blackfield Road as neighbours watched from their gardens. Bathrooms were tiled in white to the ceiling, giving them the air of a laboratory or clinic; in the Glass Room, polished onyx slabs with amber and honey-coloured veins altered the light, darkening it, reflecting it, and glowing red when the setting sun struck the stone. The contrast between the bathroom’s clinical plainness and the onyx’s changing warmth made the house’s modern surfaces more than a display of novelty: they were materials whose appearance shifted with the light and time of day.

The ivory-coloured linoleum extended the effect of openness across the ground floor. Daylight made its surface seem almost translucent, while evening light from frosted-glass ceiling fixtures cast reflections over it. The distinction between the upstairs rooms, described as separate boxes, and the spacious lower level was expressed through the contrast between the German words zimmer and raum: enclosed rooms above, an open volume below. Black and natural Shantung silk curtains and beige velvet could discreetly divide parts of the Glass Room, while geometrically placed wool rugs, fitted shelves and cupboards, and a circular dining table made the expansive interior usable without breaking its coherence.

Furnishing a Modern Home

The furniture was designed as part of an integrated whole. The Landauer chairs belonged at the dining table, the Liesel chairs in the sitting area; their steel frames reflected the light, and their upholstery echoed the carpets. Each piece appeared to fit into a pattern that was both intricate and logical. The house was not simply a container for artworks and domestic objects: its architect, Rainer von Abt, treated it as both the work of art and the studio in which that work was made. He described the relation as like that between a mother and child, each existing at the same time as the other.

Liesel’s mother, measuring the new interior against older expectations, called it like an office, a laboratory, or a hospital, and said it did not feel like a home. Liesel answered that it was the future. Viktor and Liesel saw in the completed environment a kind of perfection, an instrument for living; her mother’s rejection exposed the distance between their confidence in modern design and an earlier idea of domestic comfort. The house’s clean lines and clinical associations were not incidental to this disagreement. They were part of the future-facing design that the couple embraced and her mother distrusted.

One sculpture provided the Glass Room with a deliberate counterpoint to its spare treatment. Hana had suggested that the room needed a touch of the feminine, and von Abt agreed. Liesel and Viktor travelled to Prague to buy a life-size sculpture of a woman by the French artist Maillol. Set on a plinth beside the onyx wall, it looked over the sitting area. For Liesel, the sculpture, the room, and the house belonged to one experience of beauty: she called them beautiful and perfect. The work’s human form softened a space otherwise defined by carefully controlled light, geometry, and materials.

Move-In and Domestic Ideal

The building was formally handed over, and the family moved in at the beginning of December. Outside, sleet struck the windows and snow settled in the garden; inside, warm air from the basement boiler rose through vents at the base of the windows and circulated through the Glass Room. From there, the garden and the view toward the Špilas fortress seemed to continue into the interior, as if the landscape itself were part of the room. The house’s modernist ideal depended not only on its surfaces but on this designed relationship between inside and outside, warmth and winter, enclosure and view.

The Glass Room’s spareness made the single sculpted figure especially prominent. The principle that ornament was crime did not mean an absolute absence of objects: the Maillol sculpture had been selected precisely because the room needed a human presence. Its place beside the onyx wall joined the house’s austere design to a deliberately chosen image of the body, while the unobstructed view and changing daylight made the surrounding space feel open rather than crowded. The family’s move-in thus completed not only a building but a particular composition of architecture, art, furnishings, and landscape.

Uses and Changing Meaning

The house’s later history reversed the domestic purpose established at its completion. Under Nazi occupation, it was transformed into a biometric research centre. The upstairs rooms became offices, the kitchens were converted into a laboratory, and the basement was prepared for an X-ray machine. A photographic darkroom already left by the original owners served the new institution. Curtains divided sections of the Glass Room, while anthropometric equipment—including scales, a height-measuring stand, and callipers—was installed in front of the onyx wall. The dining area became a photographic studio, and the Bösendorfer piano was the conspicuous remnant of the house’s former life. The new arrangement made its open spaces and carefully designed surfaces serve a coercive state project rather than a family’s ideal of modern living.

Later, the Landauer House served as a children’s gymnasium. In a newspaper account, a correspondent identified it as a major architectural work in the Blackfield district, overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre, and described its conversion to a gymnasium as a subject for debate. The article acknowledged the importance of treatment for sick children while questioning whether an architectural treasure needed to house that work. This use gave the building a different public purpose from both private home and biometric centre: children received care there, even as the structure’s architectural status became an argument about heritage and practical use.

In 1990, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, restoration attempted to return the building to a recognizable form. Some original furniture was retrieved from the Moravian Museum and placed approximately where it had been; the bathroom fittings were updated, though the renovation damaged them. The Glass Room’s panes, however, were removed and plate glass restored, returning the space to its former clarity. Visitors began arriving, first mainly in organized groups and later as tourists and architecture students. Its history therefore remained visible in the gap between the house as a preserved modernist work and the successive lives its rooms had served.